Language Log

Not Pregnant - a case of overnegation?

Who is stupider, an Arkansas legislator or an AP reporter? I'm wondering because the following AP story appears widely in today's press:


You can tell how passionately the AP cares about language issues by the fact that the negation bit is right up there in the second paragraph. And CNN, who care even more about sloppy language, run this same story (without further editing, at a first glance) as Misplaced 'not' in Arkansas law allows babies to marry. Well, golly gee, I care about sloppy language too. But, there are two things that bother me more, and that's bad laws, and bullshit journalism. The Arkansas legislature is responsible for the first, and AP for the second.

The new law in question goes by the proud name of Act 441 of 2007, Section 1, and was passed in March. The problem is not one of misplaced negation. More like a really idiotic piece of legislation was drafted by a pre-law University of Arkansas (``among the top 130 universities in the nation'', screams their website excitedly) undergrad in the midst of a heavy night's drinking, and passed before sunrise so everyone could get some shut-eye. Here are the relevant parts:


So yeah, as you see, the law says that the County Clerk may issue a license to a minor who is not pregnant. But to say that this venerable act suffers from a misplaced negation would appear to imply that the law would be better if you moved or removed the negation. Or should I say "negations", plural, since the phrase "not pregnant" appears in both clauses?  But removing the negation , while it would limit the application of the law so that e.g. 8 year-old boys could not marry, would scarcely produce good law. The statute would then imply that, given parental approval, a 12 year old girl could be married provided she was first inseminated. And if we don't remove the negation, but merely move it, where do we move it too?

Perhaps ``The county clerk may not issue a marriage license to a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is pregnant after the county clerk receives satisfactory evidence of parental consent''?

Or ``The county clerk may issue a marriage license to a person who is not younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is pregnant after the county clerk receives satisfactory evidence of parental consent''?

Or ``The county clerk may issue a marriage license to a person who is younger than eighteen (18) years of age and who is pregnant after the county clerk does not receive satisfactory evidence of parental consent''?

It's hardly credible that moving the negation somewhere else in the statute would succeed in producing a piece of law that could conceivably have represented the will of the people. Then again, the people elected the bozos who passed the law, so who knows.

Incidentally, what I really like about paragraph 2 of the legislation is not the literal meaning. Rather it's the delicate implication of "who is not pregnant after the county clerk receives satisfactory evidence..." that some chain of events precipitated by the clerk's receipt of evidence might be expected to cause a minor to become pregnant. 

A further delicacy of legal interpretation: the law only says that the clerk may issue a license under these circumstances. But according to this Arkansas Government website report of a letter of the Arkansas Attorney General ``In my opinion, the clerk must issue the license if the statutory requirements, including parental consent, are met. [my emphasis - dib]" So, in this context, apparently, what is allowed is required.

The Attorney General also provides some context for the new law. In part, it appears to replace Arkansas Constitutional Amendment section 9-11-102, which the Attorney general reports as saying:


In fairness to the drafters of the legislation, and I use the plural here on the assumption that a large group was partying that night, I doubt that they intended their act to wipe out 9-11-102. Rather, they must have wanted to strengthen it, perhaps by limiting its application to non-pregnant minors. Their intention was then to leave (a), immediately above, as it stands. But in that case, the error really has nothing to do with a misplaced negation. The issue of whether there is a negation before the word pregnant in Act 441 cannot bear in any obvious way on the issue of whether the entire new statute is intended to strengthen the earlier 9-11-102, or whether it is intended to replace it.

But in that case the AP story is bullshit. It's been presented as a sloppy-use-of-language story because the idea that one tiny linguistic error can have enormous consequences seemed like a sexy byline, especially given the salaciousness of teen marriage. But the truth is apparently not so newsworthy: the Arkansas legislature has passed some bad law, and nobody's quite sure what they were trying to achieve, but don't worry because they'll be in session again in 2009. 

I'm no legal expert, and you shouldn't trust what I have to say about the interpretation of the law. But you know what? I don't think the AP reporter had any more legal training than me. And I don't think the AP reporter bothered to take 5 minutes to research the story. And the AP editorial staff? They must have been drinking from the same still as our young lawyer-to-be friends in Little Rock. "Fact checking, Arkansas", says the expenses claim.

Posted by David Beaver at October 12, 2007 02:35 AM